Thursday, November 11, 2010

Like all blogs, this one has access to some information about visitors.Nothing personal, but things like where a visitor is from, how many pages were viewed by all the people from a particular city and how long the person spent on the blog.No names, IP addresses or other identifying information is ever given.We use Google Analytics and check the numbers every day to see if a post was popular and if interest in The Kayview Gallery is growing.Thankfully it is.One of the things I notice is that readers seem to check out two pages the most, occasionally three and sometimes a whopping four pages.The two page readers are easy to figure out.They “hit the “read more”” and check out the tutorial portion of the day’s post.The blog has seven posts per page and more than thirty pages.It winds up being more than 230 individual posts.So, obviously, most people have never seen the earlier posts.Today’s main image comes from post number four, back on April 30 2009. Only the earliest and most diehard followers have seen today’s image.The original post (here) only had the finished “cartoon” style image, not the source.Today you get a look at the source to see where it started and what it became.To find out how it got from the source to the final, hit the “read more”.

As you can see, there was some housekeeping to be done before the conversion could be started. From the date you can tell that today’s image was done before the advent to Adobe Photoshop CS5’s Content Aware Fill (CAF). That means the hazard cone had to be removed “old style”, using the Clone Stamp (S). The paper notice taped to the front of the gas pump was removed and a reasonable facsimile of what the meter would look like added. My speedlite, sitting on the top of the pump is still there and, until I just pointed it out would probably have gone unnoticed. The scene was cropped to a 16 x 20 format, eliminating the second pump and the man walking it from “stage left”.

After the housekeeping the colors were exaggerated, several textures applied, things highlighted and things made to recede into the background. Colors were changed and shadows either put in or taken out. The final couple of touches were putting in the wording and “tearing” the edges.

A more detailed explanation of what went on can be found in the original post. I thought it might be fun to go back to some of the earlier images and give a little bit of the “back story” about them and show the before and after of where the image came from. If the interest is there this may become a regular feature here at the gallery.

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If you're looking through the blog and you see a shot that catches your fancy, it's probably for sale as a limited addition, signed and numbered print.

All prints are large format, starting at 16 x 20 and going up. Leave a note with your email address and we can discuss which prints are available, which are sold out and those that will never be available.